Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

author's preface.xv

self as regards customs, the discipline of the clergy, and even as regards doctrine upon points which do not affect the fundamentals of faith; what indeed is its history, its life, but one perpetual reform? this legitimate and uninterrupted reform can however be only carried on under the direction of ecclesiastical -minority and according to canonical law.

The more I see of the world, its different states and tribes, the more am I convinced that truth is immutable : it was defended with barbarity by barbarous men in barbarous ages ; it will in future be defended with humanity : but its purity cannot be affected either by the prism of error with which its adversaries are dazzled, or by the crimes of its own champions.

I should like to send into Russia, all Christians who are not Catholic, to show them what our religion may be brought to when taught in a national church, when practised under the direction of a national clergy.

The spectacle of abject servility into which the sacerdotal power can fall in a land where the church is only held of the state, would make every consistent Protestant recoil. A national church or a national clergy are words which ought never to have been joined; the church is, by its very essence, superior to all national distinctions, all human associations; to abandon the church universal in order to enter into any political church, is to do worse than err in faith, — it is to abjure the faith, it is to fall back again from heaven to earth.

And yet how many sincere, how many excellent men believed, at the 'birth of Protestantism, that